Woo
Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong

The Ives brothers were fed up. Their inner self was restless because the musical landscape was deceptive and the music they were subjected to was unsatisfactory. What to do? The obvious solution: "We'll make the omelet ourselves." Those who do it themselves do it for three; the musical omelet is cooked and eaten, made "at home."

Closed in the seclusion of those eerie English row houses in Wimbledon, instead of playing with rackets, they started whipping up delicacies for gourmets of intimate flavors, where the first consumers, in addition to being the ingredients, are themselves. A sort of ethereal cannibalism that results in an absurdity: fasting while eating.

And is there a danger of starving by relying on this pantry? Unlikely. The subtleties of the matter are that they nourish themselves with air. And so those playful Neapolitan souvenirs transform into substance claiming authenticity: "Air of Naples," in the little vial. Like the bottle's glass, the vinyl contains "after-hours" things that vaguely recall the rabbit's pocket watch. The WOO's clock is stopped, but twice a day, it still shows the correct time.

The interstices "in the meantime of..." life are proposed with music that sediment evanescence. Electronic passages, ambient tunes, world music from places unknown to all, live recordings from a magical forest where moods of elves and fairies trigger a dissociation from rational reality. Both cerebral hemispheres are called into play for an apparently calm involvement; there's an invisible obesity of rarefaction...

And there they are, serene in photographs with their age-old headdresses, Siamese twins of a calm eclecticism that does not commercialize the wonder of an intimacy they wanted to humanely share. The IPR label rejoices in reissuing everything in 1986 from an album that had already been released in 1982, music that Mark and Clive started making since 1972 in their little room, creating something they wanted to hear, never thinking anyone else would be interested in listening. They minded their own business; will they live a hundred years? They will live much longer.